For sluggish digestion, Morristown cocktail expert Warren Bobrow concocts a simple syrup steeped with fennel, a natural diuretic, and pours it into a Collins glass with crushed ice, raki (the anise-based Turkish spirit), bitters, and chile flakes (a little sweat does a body good), topping it with seltzer water.

Bobrow, a food and spirits writer known as the Cocktail Whisperer, offers the Peppery Fennel Fizz and dozens of other vintage-styled “curatives” in his new book, “Apothecary Cocktails: Restorative Drinks from Yesterday and Today” (Fair Winds Press, $21.99).

Does he stand behind their medicinal qualities?

“No!” he says, laughing, and immediately follows up with a good-natured disclaimer: “Consult your doctor before you begin any new regimen.”

Bobrow maintains the blog cocktailwhisperer.com and is the master mixologist for several liquor brands (including Busted Barrel, from New Jersey’s first distillery since Prohibition), as well as lifestyle gurus the Fabulous Beekman Boys. The book’s drink recipes are all grounded in history, but, he clarifies, it’s a cocktail book, not a cure-all.

A little more than a century ago, those who complained of aches, infections and stomach ailments (and in the age of spotty refrigeration, stomach ailments were rampant) couldn’t just pop over to their local board-certified physician or even head to the emergency room, Bobrow explains.

They turned to the local pharmacist (or a visiting carnival) for elixirs and tonics made with botanicals preserved with distilled alcohol. Many of these curatives date back centuries and used herbs, flowers, fruits and vegetables with known healing qualities — although some were undoubtedly laced with quackery.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 instituted federal oversight of such restoratives, effectively moving alcohol out of the apothecary and into the corner bar, although some storied herbal liqueurs enjoying a renaissance in craft cocktails today — Chartreuse, Fernet Branca, Bénédictine — were born as medicinal elixirs.

Bobrow takes a personal interest in patent medicine; his mother’s family owned J.B. Williams Co., the manufacturer of Geritol, the alcohol-based tonic that claimed to cure “tired blood.” Bobrow himself downed a spoonful of Geritol every morning before school — with few lasting effects, he says with an eye roll. (While he was growing up, the Federal Trade Commission’s cracked down on Geritol’s makers for false advertising. The FTC later imposed an $812,000 fine, the largest of the day.)

Bobrow now lives in a rambling, sun-washed farmhouse on a ridge in Morristown, surrounded by bookshelves overstuffed with hardcovers and cabinets overflowing with bottles. They include rare, highly prized spirits; sentimental treasures such as an ancient quarter-empty bottle of Old Forester Bourbon that used to belong to his grandfather (he rescued it when his grandmother decided it would make a nice vase); and European spirits unavailable in the United States because the makers refuse to disclose the secret ingredients: “The monks won’t give it up,” Bobrow says.

As a simmering osso bucco throws off a heady scent from the kitchen, Bobrow details his journey from Geritol to cocktail guru. His family always served wine growing up, so he learned about Burgundy before he knew Coca-Cola existed. He is a trained chef who first learned the art of soul food from his family’s cook and still lives by her tenets: simple ingredients, cooked simply with love. “I try to smile when I cook because the food knows it.”

After earning his degree in film and television from Emerson College and spending a year as a research assistant at MIT, he decided he really wanted to be in the kitchen and started out as a pot-scrubber in a restaurant in Maine, then worked his way through the stations. He studied at Johnson & Wales in Charleston, S.C., and opened the state’s first fresh pasta factory, which was soon wiped out by Hurricane Hugo.

He returned home and worked at a number of restaurants in the area until he became disillusioned with the restaurant world and let his family arrange a banking job for him. He spent the next 20 years in private banking, about which he has a few opinions: “It was as soul-sucking as anyone can imagine. It’s like killing yourself. It’s worse than killing yourself. It’s a slow death.”

Bobrow had always kept a hand in the culinary and wine world, and in 2009, when his job was off-shored, he decided it was time for a change. He started writing about food and wine, and developing his culinary take on the cocktail. His next book, about whiskey, comes out next fall.

“I write about liquor as I write about food, as I write about life,” he says, “the balance of bitter to sweet.”